Trilogía del espacio

Before Sputnik, before Gagarin, Arthur C. Clarke described with astonishing precision in his novels, previously unpublished in Spanish, the conquest of space and the most intimate details of how human beings would navigate Earth's orbit... and beyond. In "Prelude to Space", published here for the first time in Spanish, Clarke imagines a consortium of companies and institutions, Interplanetary, that plans and carries out the first flight to the Moon. Clarke's proposal is so plausible that his rocket features a reusable first stage, a logical design that was discarded during the space race and actual lunar missions, but which has been successfully revived by private space companies today. In Islands in the Sky, also previously unpublished in Spanish, the lucky winner of a television contest receives as a prize a stay at the Inner Station, the closest of the string of space stations orbiting Earth in the 21st century: from weather stations to space hotels and hospitals, including the repeater stations that enable communication between all points on the planet in geostationary orbit, or the "Clarke orbit," so named because Clarke was the first to theorize it. Shipwreck in the Sea of ​​the Moon, presented here in a new translation, is the last of Clarke's early novels that cemented his worldwide fame before 2001. In it, a lunar tourist ship, the Selene, catastrophically sinks into a lunar hollow filled with fine dust, and the trapped passengers and the lunar authorities must use all their ingenuity to save the ship from being swallowed by this relentless physical phenomenon.